A Fearsome Thing

“You really aren’t afraid, are you?

‘No,’ Conor said. ‘Not of you, anyway.’”

Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls (2011) ¹

The first chapter of A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness (based on an idea by Siobhan Dowd)² introduces us to two characters: a boy called Conor and the yew tree he can see from his bedroom window – or, more specifically, the monster that the yew tree he can see from his bedroom window becomes.

 

Ness, Patrick, A Monster Calls (London: Walker Books, 2011).

I have come to get you, Conor O’Malley,³ the monster said, pushing against the house, shaking the pictures off Conor’s wall, sending books and electronic gadgets and an old stuffed toy rhino tumbling to the floor.

A monster, Conor thought. A real, honest-to-goodness monster. In real, waking life. Not in a dream, but here, at his window.

Come to get him.

But Conor didn’t run.

In fact, he found he wasn’t even frightened.

All he could feel, all he had felt since the monster revealed itself, was a growing disappointment.

Because this wasn’t the monster he was expecting.

“So come and get me then,” he said.

Conor isn’t scared of the monster that might or might not be a dream. He is, on the other hand, extraordinarily scared of the nightmare he has on a regular basis that’s definitely a dream. This from a bit later on:

“Can’t you just leave me alone?”

The monster shook its head, but not in answer to Conor’s question. It is most unusual, it said. Nothing I do seems to make you frightened of me.

“You’re just a tree,” Conor said, and there was no other way he could think about it…

And you have worse things to be frightened of, said the monster, but not as a question.

Conor looked at the ground, then up at the moon, anywhere but the monster’s eyes. The nightmare feeling was rising in him, turning everything around him to darkness, making everything seem heavy and impossible, like [sic] he’d been asked to lift a mountain with his bare hands and no one would let him leave until he did.

Page after page, chapter after chapter, we’re not told what the nightmare really is. That said, we get hints and beginnings, and, whatever else is going on in the story, it looms ever large in the corner. We can be pretty sure it has something to do with Conor’s mum, who is embroiled in a lengthy and wearisome battle with cancer, and maybe people with more of a knack for these things than I have would consider its more specific contents readily deducible from the concerns and emphases of the plotline – but the narrative is as reluctant as its protagonist to actually acknowledge, confront, and expose the nightmare, even as it is as enslaved as him to its dark and heavy presence. I emphasise this point because I am about to spoil what the nightmare is, and if you haven’t yet read the book, you might like to leave the rest of this post until you have done, so that the ending, when you get to it, might be as compelling for you as it was for me.

In the nightmare, Conor’s mum is pulled over a cliff-edge by ‘a cloud of burning darkness’. Conor grabs hold of her as she falls, becoming her sole anchor to the ground, but finds it impossible to pull her back up and increasingly unbearable to keep holding onto her.

This was the nightmare. This was the nightmare that woke him up screaming every night. This was it happening, right now, right here.

He was on the cliff edge, bracing himself, holding onto his mother’s hands with all his strength, trying to keep her from being pulled down into the blackness, pulled down by the creature below the cliff.

Who [sic] he could see all of now.

The real monster, the one he was properly afraid of, the one he’d expected to see when the yew tree first showed up, the real, nightmare monster, formed of cloud and ash and dark flames, but with real muscle, real strength, real red eyes that glared back at him and flashing teeth that would eat his mother alive. I’ve seen worse, Conor had told the yew tree that first night.

And here was the worse thing.

The worse thing is this: Conor lets his mum go. He tries to tell himself that she fell, that he was physically incapable of holding her any longer, but the yew-tree monster sets him straight, repeating again and again: you let her go. For a good while Conor refuses to admit it, can’t bear even to entertain the merest shadow of the notion that he wanted his mum to fall, but eventually he gives in:

“I can’t stand it any more!” he cried out as the fire raged around him. “I can’t stand knowing that she’ll go! I just want it to be over! I just want it to be finished!”

And then the fire ate the world, wiping away everything, wiping him away with it.

He welcomed it with relief, because it was, at last, the punishment he deserved.

Conor isn’t scared of the yew-tree monster’s threats to eat him alive. He isn’t even scared of the nightmare’s fire that consumes the whole world. What he’s scared of is admitting that there is part of him that wants his mother to die. He’s scared that those secret yearnings harboured by his heart which he deems bad and wrong and shameful will be exposed. He’s scared of the truth about himself, the truth on whose account he understands himself to stand guilty and deserving of punishment, and of that truth becoming known. Only what threatens to expose that truth, consequently, is able to hold real power over him.

 

The monster is, after all, only a yew tree.

I think we’re all rather like that. Compare, if you will, the following chunk of the book of Isaiah:

In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”⁴

The Lord is much – infinitely – bigger and more powerful and more terrifying than any monster, real or dreamt. Nonetheless, note what it is specifically that Isaiah’s distressed about: he is of unclean lips, and yet his eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts, who is not just holy, but holy holy holy (a cameo there from our favourite Hebrew poetic technique of repetition for emphasis). He’s in the presence of one who knows the truth about him and all that’s bad and wrong and shameful in him and what he says, and whose moral inscrutability and cosmic sovereignty qualify him to sentence Isaiah to whatever punishment he deems fit. And he is, rightly, terrified: “Woe is me! For I am lost.”

There are some scary things out there. There are all kinds of monsters, most of them not formed from yew trees. But the most fearsome thing of all is to have the truth about oneself, the despicable sentiments one holds and expresses, exposed; and, because it is the truth, to be unable to deny it; and so to stand condemned on its account. Conor and Isaiah both get this.

The yew-tree monster knew the truth about Conor. It could have punished him for it – earlier in the novel it told him a couple of different stories about how it had wrought judgement on the deserving in various ways – and in fact Conor expects it to punish him for it. All through the novel he has been expecting some kind of punishment that never seems to arrive. But what actually happens is that after the firestorm, when Conor wakes up unexpectedly alive, the monster’s first concern is to comfort him: his secret yearning, it reassures him, is only one of a million conflicting desires at the core of his being; it is motivated by nothing other than the natural-as-anything desire for an end to his own pain; and it has absolutely zero to do with what will actually happen to his mum. Conor cannot, in other words, be blamed for what happens to his mum; it is established that he is not guilty of doing her harm.

What happens to Isaiah next is a bit different.

Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.”

Both Conor and Isaiah are established as being not guilty, but whereas in Conor’s case it was because he was never really guilty in the first place, Isaiah’s guilt, on the other hand, is acknowledged as very much real – and then dealt with. It is taken away and atoned for. The truth of what Isaiah was like coloured him guilty, and it would have been perfectly fair and right and sensible for God to have condemned him, but instead, he chose to change the truth of what Isaiah was like so that he didn’t have to be condemned.

The same is true of all of us who have placed our trust in Jesus’ atonement for our guilt made at the cross. Sure, we’re still riddled with wrongdoing in our earthly selves, in ‘the flesh’, but the real truth of who we are is no longer that we are guilty, but that we possess Jesus’ own righteousness exactly as if it were our own. And, by way of consequence, we never have to be afraid of standing condemned by the truth about ourselves. No accuser has any truthful evidence to bring against us. The fear that drove Conor’s nightmare, the fear that enslaved him by night and lurked in the shadows of his waking mind, can hold no power over us: there is – not because we are good but because God is merciful – no longer anything wrong in us to be exposed.

Let that sink in a moment. That’s massive.

We’re set free from the most fearsome fear there is, the fear that the truth of who we are will be exposed and we will stand condemned on account of it, the fear, in other words, of God’s righteous judgement on wrongdoers. And consequently, we’re able to exercise a better fear: a right, good, beautiful awe of who God is and what he’s done. Isn’t there, after all, something thoroughly magnificent and awe-inspiring and, yes, fearsome about a love so absolute it would give up everything for the sake of atoning for the guilty?

If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities,

O Lord, who could stand?

But with you there is forgiveness,

that you may be feared.⁵

Footnotes 

¹ A film adaptation was also released last year. I haven’t seen it and so can’t tell you whether it’s any good, but the trailer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2Xbo-irtBA, looks fairly promising. 

² I was given the book by a friend some time ago but only got round to reading it recently. Sincere thanks to said friend for the gift: this book is beautiful and well worth getting hold of: http://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Patrick-Ness/A-Monster-Calls/16537257. 

³ In the text of the novel, the monster’s words are italicised rather than emboldened, but because I put the entire quotation in italics, I thought bold would be better than a reversion to normal type (for so blatantly abnormal a character). These kinds of decisions occupy far too much of my brain… 

⁴ Whole chapter for you: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isaiah+6&version=ESVUK. 

⁵ This is a brief and exquisite psalm that is really, really worth the very little time it will take you to read it: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm+130&version=ESVUK.

The Trouble with Romance's Monopoly on the Vocabulary of Affection

“I definitely have strong feelings for you. I just haven’t decided if they’re positive or negative yet.”

Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (2010)

It occurs to me that the trouble, as it so often does, really comes down to the English language. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start, as per the usual, by sketching out an example from the world of fiction.

Apparently the heart symbol has now made it into the Oxford dictionary, which I suppose makes it the first official logogram in the English language.

When Marnie Was There is the most recent product of that greenhouse of creative brilliance that is Studio Ghibli, and a definite contender for my favourite of all the studio’s films.¹ I first saw it last term at my university’s campus cinema,² and discovered that one of the benefits of going to the cinema alone is the opportunity to eavesdrop, quite accidentally of course, on other people’s conversations about the film as they assemble their possessions and leave the auditorium. In this case, I caught a snatch of someone’s comment that she enjoyed the film, but would have preferred it if her fellow cinemagoers had managed to refrain from sniggering at what she termed, as I recall, the ‘lesbian overtones’ present in the dialogue.

Now, I might be wrong, but I’m not sure there actually are any intended lesbian overtones in When Marnie Was There. I think it is a film about female friendship, in which protagonist Anna’s interactions with the mysterious Marnie – whose real identity I won’t spoil – are deliberately contrasted with her interactions with other girls her age. Anna’s extreme shyness and insecurity are painted very empathically indeed, and it makes perfect sense that she needs the deliberate slow pace, the exclusivity, and the lack of pressure from external sources that her relationship with Marnie entails in order to learn how to do this whole friendship thing, whereas her more ordinary peers, while well-meaning, would have never offered her the space she needed to initially emerge from her shell. But all that said, I can definitely see why other people would conclude that there are lesbian overtones in the film, and I won’t claim that the notion didn’t cross my mind while I was watching it.

When they first meet, Anna tells Marnie that she had dreams about a girl just like her. Later, Marnie tells Anna that she is her ‘precious secret’ and beswears her never to tell anyone else about their friendship. Marnie teaches Anna to row and to dance and I could see how one might easily read something romantic into both scenes. And on top of all that, the two of them end up boldly confessing their love for one another more than once. “I love you more than any girl I’ve ever known,” is the line on one such occasion, if I remember rightly.

Now, there is nothing inherent within that statement that specifies that this relationship is a romantic one. We all know that ‘love’ has many shades of meaning. But it just sounds romantic, doesn’t it? Somehow it just pushes those buttons. I have, unfortunately, no idea how the original Japanese script and the way it would be most readily perceived among native speakers compare, but I’d hazard that the translators who worked on the English version may have had a pretty tough job trying to render the dialogue in a manner both accurate and not overly romanticky – because pretty much every expression of earnest affection that exists in English lends itself to a romantic interpretation.

English-speakers make a huge deal out of the significance of the phrase ‘I love you’; its being said is seen as constituting a seismic levelling-up of a romantic relationship, as we all know from such beloved sitcoms as Miranda and The Big Bang Theory.³ Even the milder ‘I like you’ has romantic connotations, hence all those rather amusing ‘well, yes, I like you, but I don’t like you’ scenes (there’s a good one in Leonardo, for which see below), and the introduction of the term ‘like like’ as opposed to just ‘like’. And again, even the arguably neutral ‘I have feelings for you’ never appears outside a romantic context, with the possible exception of that awful line in the first Percy Jackson film that book-Annabeth would never have uttered in a million years.⁴ In short, we just don’t have a vocabulary for expressing love of a non-romantic quality.

And it’s not just deep friendships between peers, like Anna and Marnie’s, that lose out because of this. Consider, for instance, a scene in Leonardo, perhaps my absolute favourite of those brilliant CBBC dramas I’m always going on about,⁵ in which the eponymous hero, a young da Vinci, hears the maestro of the workshop where he is an apprentice, Verocchio, confess to having committed manslaughter in his youth. “What do you think of your precious maestro now?” asks Verocchio, clearly ashamed. Leonardo replies, “It doesn’t change the way I feel.” And again, doesn’t that last line just sound like something someone ought to be saying in a romantic context? But it’s categorically not. This is a deep-seated, important, loving relationship – between a student and his mentor. Where’s our vocabulary for expressing meaningful affection in that context?

Then again, perhaps I’m making this out to be more of an issue than it really is. Perhaps romantic connotations aren’t nearly as ubiquitous in the English language as I’m claiming, and I’m just overly sensitive to the possibility of their presence. Still, in light of my general impermeable obliviousness about romantic matters – “So you know X and Y are a couple…” / “No! I had literally no idea!” – I have to say I think it rather unlikely. Plus, I did start this post with an example of someone other than myself reading romantic connotations into something. And also, Ed Shaw claims pretty much the same thing in the fifth chapter of his quite excellent book The Plausibility Problem.⁶ Having identified ‘sex is where true intimacy is found’ as a misconception held by many in the Church as well as in wider society, he quotes the following verse from King David’s lament for Jonathan after the latter is killed in battle:
“I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan;
very pleasant have you been to me;
your love to me was extraordinary,
surpassing the love of women.”⁷ 
He then comments as follows:
“Today it seems impossible for anyone to read this song without thinking that David and Jonathan must have enjoyed a sexual relationship. Didn’t you find yourself quickly sniffing out something homoerotic about them? Off the back of this one verse, some have even claimed biblical approval of gay relationships – all because David says Jonathan’s love for him was better than a woman’s. We just can’t stop ourselves.”
I’ll stop quoting there, though I’d very much encourage you to go away and get hold of the book and read the rest of it for yourself. Shaw goes on to argue that, since everybody needs intimacy, we need to cultivate intimate friendships of a non-romantic, non-sexual nature, otherwise we get that misconception in our heads that a romantic, sexual relationship is the only possible site of satisfaction of this need of ours – which isn’t any more helpful for people who are in such a relationship than for people who aren’t.

And I think that the matter of vocabulary, the monopoly that romantic (and so implicitly sexual) love holds over all verbal expressions of heartfelt affection, allowing other forms of love mere crumbs, makes no negligible contribution to this over-exaltation of romantic love as the only kind that really matters. If romance is allowed to hoard for herself the vocabulary of true affection, isn’t the inevitable result that we start to think that she is the only place where true affection can actually be found? If any earnest confession of feelings of love is automatically seen as carrying romantic implications, isn’t the inevitable result that other forms of love cease to be recognised as important?

The main character of a very enjoyable novel I once read⁸ – an alien living on earth and pretending to be human, and incapable of experiencing romantic love – puts it like this: “I hate it when people talk like friendship is less than other kinds of – as though it’s some sort of runner-up prize for people who can’t have sex. I had a boyfriend once, but I never liked being with him the way I like being with you … You’re one of the best friends I’ve ever had, Milo. And that is everything to me.”

On one level, look how hard she has to work to assemble a sentence that communicates to Milo how important he is to her without leaving space for hints at the romance she knows can never happen between them. Even ‘I never liked being with him the way I like being with you’ would sound romantic – wouldn’t it? – if it weren’t so determinedly sandwiched between a closing off of romantic possibilities. But on another level, isn’t the state of affairs she describes, where non-romantic forms of love are considered ‘less than’ options, consolation prizes for those who can’t manage to attain to the best thing, as accurate as it is saddening? I’m not saying that vocabulary is the only or even the primary factor responsible for fostering such a state of affairs, but it is surely a factor.

All right, so I’ve made my point: seeing romantic connotations in every verbal expression of love, and thus pretty much excluding all forms of love except romance from the opportunity to be verbally expressed, unavoidably contributes to an undervaluation of these other forms of love, a lack of recognition of them, and so a spurning of everything they have to offer in favour of harmfully excessive exaltation of romantic love. What exactly am I suggesting we do about it?

Well, I suppose the most obvious thing to suggest is that we start trying to reclaim the vocabulary of love for use in non-romantic contexts. I feel I should make clear that this is very much an exhortation from the gutter rather than a helping hand held down from a position of superiority: I am as awkwardly British as anybody, and telling people I care about them doesn’t come easily to me in any circumstance, let alone in a fashion deliberately designed to overstep social boundaries. If I am going to be a part of my proposed revolution, I am going to need a lot of help. But then again, so, I imagine, are some of you; and I know how much it has meant to me when a friend has signed off a letter with ‘I love you very much’, or included ‘you are a treasure and a blessing’ in a Christmas-wishes text; and, from little instances like these, I am, baby-step by baby-step, learning; and I state my humble intention, in light of what I’ve said, to try. 

Footnotes 

¹ Fancy a trailer? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WASWpDAFOe4. 

² Because I never pass up an opportunity to plug Campus Cinema: http://campuscinema.co.uk/. 

³ I talk about the relevant Miranda episode in ‘Thoughts on Love 2: Luvvou’, under ‘2015’ and ‘October’ in the box on the right. The Big Bang Theory one I’m thinking of is S3 E19, ‘The Wheaton Recurrence’. I’m sure you can think of your own examples; these were just the first couple that came to mind in my case. 

⁴ Seriously, I know the book’s pretty much always better than the film, but in the case of Percy Jackson this is the case to a quite ludicrous extent. Here’s some very stylish artwork depicting a number of the key characters, http://rickriordan.com/characters/, because why not. 

⁵ Aw, just watching the trailer made me really happy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0VSpmyy4UM. Shame it only got two series, but better that it go out on a high than suffer a slow and painful retreat into lame mediocrity. Like some series I could mention. Ahem. 

⁶ Well argued and much needed: https://www.thegoodbook.co.uk/the-plausibility-problem. 

⁷ Here’s the whole chapter, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+sam+1&version=ESVUK, but if you’re unfamiliar with the story of David and Jonathan, aka Greatest Bromance Ever, you should work through 1 Samuel first for added emotional impact. 

⁸ The novel in question was Quicksilver by R. J. Anderson, a sequel of sorts to Ultraviolet but probably my favourite of the two: http://www.rj-anderson.com/book/quicksilver/.

Moana's Mixed Messages

“I had a professor once who liked to tell his students that there were only ten different plots in all of fiction. Well, I’m here to tell you he was wrong. There is only one: who am I?”

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

Here be spoilers. Lots of spoilers. All the spoilers. Also, the below may not make all that much sense if you haven’t seen Moana. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

 

The word Polynesia, which is the place where Moana is set, comes from the Greek for ‘many islands’. Original.

So I’ve seen Moana in the cinema twice now, and I’d just like to make it clear before I start bombarding its worldview with criticism that I think it’s a very enjoyable film, with entertaining dialogue, gorgeous animation, and the best overall soundtrack of any Disney animated classic released this century. Still, I’m afraid that I am, nonetheless, about to start bombarding its worldview with criticism, now that I’ve had ample time to ponder it. Said ample time was more necessary than one might, perhaps, have expected, much as I’ve never been one to disdain family-friendly animated films as necessarily lacking intelligence, nuance, or depth. The trouble with Moana was that I just couldn’t work out what it was the film wanted me to buy into, as it were. It seemed to be affirming mixed messages. If I was supposed to be invested in the idea of Moana as the Chosen One (standard),¹ then where did Maui’s constant sarcastic undermining of that idea, poking metacinematic fun at the trope, fit in? If I was supposed to agree with Moana that the loss of Maui’s fishhook didn’t alter his identity, then why did the situation seem to be so different in the case of the loss of Te Fiti’s heart? Well, I had a closer look and a harder think, and the closer I looked and the harder I thought, the less, I’m sorry to say, I liked what I discerned.

The big question of the film, I think, is this: how do I know who I am? Granted, that’s not exactly a massively surprising thing for the creators of the film to have chosen as the driver of the storyline, particularly if one agrees with Peter Parker’s English teacher that no other plot exists in the entire realm of fiction.² Still, I think it’ll be worth taking a look at some of the options the film presents, and the one on which it ultimately ends up settling.

Option One: My society tells me who I am.

Moana is the daughter of the village chief. Consequently, her parents and their subjects – the sum total of everybody she knows, in fact – expect her to one day fill her father’s shoes (does he wear shoes?) as the leader of her people, and until that day comes, to dedicate herself to preparing to take on that role. The society of which Moana is a member will happily tell her who she is – their next leader, the next slab of stone on top of the mountain, duty-bound to devote herself to maintaining her people’s health and happiness. Sounds straightforward enough.

However, much as Moana recognises the value of the role of chief, she harbours a longing for a different kind of life. Specifically, she doesn’t want to stay on her island; she wants to voyage.

I know everybody on this island seems so happy on this island; everything is by design.

I know everybody on this island has a role on this island, so maybe I can roll with mine.

I can lead with pride;

I can make us strong;

I’ll be satisfied

If I play along,

But the voice inside

Sings a different song.

What is wrong with me? …

See the line where the sky meets the sea? It calls me.³

The film quickly discards the option that Moana’s society will tell her who she is. The Voice Inside has contrary ideas, and will not be silenced.

Option Two: My history tells me who I am.

After a single disastrous attempt to pilot her canoe beyond the safety of the reef, Moana declares herself ready to lay her stone on the mountain and accept her society-given identity. However, she’s clearly looking for an excuse not to do so, and her grandmother, the self-proclaimed Village Crazy Lady, is happy to provide one. She directs Moana to a hidden cave where a number of huge old boats have been left abandoned, and Moana realises that the ancestors of her people were expert navigators who used to cross the seas discovering new islands as a matter of course. Moana dashes out of the cave exclaiming, “We were voyagers!” with an enthusiasm that tips over into ludicrousness.

The apparent weight given to this option intrigued me. Whereas the expectations of Moana’s current society had been entirely dismissed from being allowed to define her identity, the film seemed to afford a greater authority to these more antiquated traditions. Moana saw the precedent set by her forebears as a justification for her own ambition. Might her heritage be the source of her identity?

I think not. Moana was looking for an excuse to follow her own desires and that was exactly what she got. The fact that her ancestors were voyagers might add weight to her argument, but it wasn’t that that fostered the Voice Inside; it only happened to chime with it at an opportune moment.

Option Three: An external higher power tells me who I am.

So the Voice Inside is proved the supreme factor over both concordant and discordant external voices – but where does the Voice Inside come from? For the better part of the film, Moana seems to understand it as the call of the ocean. The ocean chose her to restore the heart of Te Fiti, thereby saving her island from ruin, and she must obey its call, whatever anyone else says.

 

Excuse for a pretty ocean picture! This is Hawaii, apparently, so pretty close to Polynesia.

The ocean is cast in a fairly godlike role here. It’s clearly pulling the strings so that Moana might succeed in her quest – by relentlessly depositing her back on the boat when Maui attempts to throw her off it, for instance – and that’s true even when things aren’t going the way she expected: she’s none too impressed when she initially ends up shipwrecked, but as it turns out, that’s the means by which she encounters Maui, whose help she is going to need to restore Te Fiti’s heart. The ocean has a plan and has decided to use Moana as a key cog in the machine. Or so it would seem.

The point at which this option gets blown out of the water – so to speak – is the dramatic “I Am Moana” scene towards the end of the film, where Moana, having failed in her first attempt to get past the lava-monster Te Kā and been abandoned by Maui as a result, engages in the traditional Chosen-One pursuit of Rejection of the Call by giving the heart of Te Fiti back to the ocean with a demand that it choose someone else. She’s all ready to set sail for home, even when the stingray-reincarnated ghost of her grandmother (yeah, I’m not totally sure how that’s supposed to work either) shows up – but she hesitates. Her grandmother responds with a reprise of the film’s exposition song, finishing as follows:

Nothing on earth can silence the quiet voice still inside you.

And if that voice starts to whisper, “Moana, you’ve come so far,”

Moana, listen: do you know who you are?

So this is it. We’re about to get Moana’s very own answer to the big question of the story whose protagonist she is. She riffs on the previous options we’ve encountered for a bit, before concluding, as the music swells climactically:

And the call isn’t out there at all; it’s inside me.⁴

Option Four: I tell myself who I am.

The Voice Inside, Moana declares, doesn’t come from the ocean at all. Its source is her own self. She dives to retrieve the heart of Te Fiti and sets off with her determined face on to make another attempt to restore it. She doesn’t need the ocean to call her. She does what she wants.

And, on top of that, she actually starts bossing the ocean about. When she realises that Te Kā is really just what Te Fiti becomes without her heart, she orders the ocean to let the lava-monster come to her, and it duly parts. Far from being a cog in the ocean’s plan, she turns it into a cog in hers. She’s not the Chosen One because the ocean chose her, it emerges: the ocean isn’t actually the one with the agency here. Rather, she’s the Chosen One because she took hold of the role for herself. And thus, Moana doesn’t rely on her society, or her history, or an external higher power to tell her who she is. She defines herself.

But what about when we bring other characters into the equation? Before she had her I-define-myself revelation, Moana told Maui that his magic fishhook isn’t what makes him who he is, which turns out to slot quite nicely into her worldview as subsequently revealed: one’s identity should not be placed in any external factor. But then, post-revelation, she tells Te Kā,

I know your name.

They have stolen the heart from inside you,

But this does not define you.

I know who you are – who you truly are.

Who is Moana, fearless advocate of self-definition, to tell anybody else what defines him or who he truly is?⁵ And isn’t a bit jarring to claim that the fact that Te Kā’s heart has been stolen ‘does not define’ her, when it literally turned her from a benevolent, life-giving, green island into a terrifying, destructive lava-monster with a different personality and even a different name? It isn’t as if all it takes is Moana’s reminder for Te Kā to recall who she truly is and revert to that form; her heart has to be put back in its place before that happens. In other words, Te Kā doesn’t get the privilege Moana enjoys of deciding on her own identity; she requires certain external factors to align in order to be the version of herself she wants to be, namely Te Fiti. So the hero is allowed to be whoever she wants, but the villain has to be who the hero says she is. Moana, as it turns out, doesn’t really buy its own conclusion to enough of an extent to apply it to all the characters equally.

The thing is, the I-define-myself option does not, cannot really work. If Moana defines Moana, if subject and object are one and the same, who is it that’s defining whom? By the time she’s finished defining herself, she is no longer the same self who did the defining, and so she hasn’t really defined herself at all. She’s doomed to chase herself round in circles forever, never actually able to settle into an identity. How do I know who I am? Well, if I define myself, the ‘I’ who does the knowing part can never be the same one who does the being part. I can never really know who I am.

This is not a new argument, by the way. It has all been said before, by lots of people much wiser and more worthy of your attention than I am.⁶ But I thought it would be useful to discuss it with Moana as a case-study. The ‘I define myself’ conclusion is a big favourite in current fiction, so much so that I think we’ve become quite numb to it, but in Moana – lovely, harmless, family-friendly Moana that surely couldn’t contain anything unwholesome – it’s especially overt. Just listen to the soundtrack again and attend to every mention of ‘who you are’ or similar ideas. ‘I define myself’ is kind of the theme tune of our culture and we need to be able to pick it out from the noise and name it for what it is – a big fat lie.

So, much as I reckon I’ve managed to sift through Moana’s mixed messages to reveal the ideas that it in fact wants me to buy into, I certainly don’t mean to respond by blithely buying into those ideas. If we’re talking in terms of the four identity-defining possibilities the film presents, you won’t be surprised to hear that I’d consider Option Three the one to go for, although with the external higher power in question not as a peculiarly sentient body of water, but as the living God who created us, sustains us, and has every right to define who we are. How blessed we are that, if we trust in Jesus as our saviour, he defines us as righteous, as beloved, as heirs to his kingdom, indeed!⁷ The way God defines us is infinitely superior to any identity we could attempt to build for ourselves.

And, to leave you with one last thought, isn’t it rather ironic that, by embracing the ‘I define myself’ mentality that our society so enthusiastically endorses, we’re really just drifting back into the uninspiring throes of Option One; that as it turns out, to determinedly define oneself is really just to let an external influence define one after all? To follow the Voice Inside isn’t to stand out from the crowd, but to play right along to society’s tune. To follow Jesus – unashamedly, unreservedly, unswervingly – that, on the other hand, is something really distinctive.

Footnotes

¹ One can happily add Moana to the list of characters fulfilling the Chosen-One type as laid out in the Honest Trailer for Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n9358zVHwM.

² My thanks go to a friend who is currently staying with me for mentioning the scene in question when I told her the gist of what this post was going to be about. It makes, I think, a very appropriate opening quotation indeed.

³ And here we have a happy opportunity for me to provide a link to Jonathan Young’s rather lovely cover of this particular song, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ixCu-Vcu4o, with a view to recommending his work in general: I draw particular attention to his covers of ‘The Plagues’ from The Prince of Egypt, ‘In the Dark of the Night’ from Anastasia, ‘Hellfire’ from The Hunchback of Notre Dame and ‘Mine, Mine, Mine’ from Pocahontas, but I only discovered him recently (my thanks go to the friend who recommended his channel) and so am entirely prepared to believe that there’s some amazing stuff there that I haven’t yet got round to listening to.

⁴ A clip of the scene that some thoughtful human has uploaded to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEiSF8HpyDg.

⁵ I use the masculine pronouns here to make it clear that I’m not referring to Moana. Te Fiti/Te Kā is actually also female, as I hope is made clear elsewhere in this post.

⁶ Check out this talk by Tim Keller, for instance, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ehw87PqTwKw, at which point I must yet again offer my gratitude to the friend who recommended it to me.

⁷ I’m going to give you Romans 8 for this jazz, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+8&version=ESVUK, because I’m a bit obsessed with Romans 8, to the point where I’m kind of suspicious of anyone who isn’t also a bit obsessed with Romans 8.